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How can you absolutely stop a bully during a negotiation? First, you have to ask yourself, what does he want? The answer will give you insight into his mindset, which will allow you to adopt strategies to combat him. From there, you can use the following strategies to stop a bully in your negotiations.

What a bully wants:

A bully wants recognition and positive attention. He wants to be recognized by others as possessing traits that enhance his image; that image serves to enhance his self-esteem. In a negotiation, you can play to his need by lavishing praise upon him. That may allow you to be invited into his good graces. It may also be the setup for more bullying. Know the probability of the outcome you seek and that will give you the insight into which strategy to employ.

Bully’s mindset:

A bully has to have others perceive him as being strong, impressive, and important. He’ll attempt to intimidate you to obtain that recognition. To alter his mindset during negotiations, use pattern interrupts (e.g. he makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer and you get up to leave without saying a word.) Doing so will confound him, which will cause him to rethink his strategy. If you can alter his mind, you can change the way the bully thinks. Do so by confounding him and you’ll deprive him of the tools he needs to promote his bullying efforts.

Strategies to stop a bully:

You should always confront a bully. Doing so will let him know that you’re aware of his tactics. It’ll also send a signal that you may retaliate. Depending on the bully’s perception of your strength, you can confront him openly or behind closed doors. Do so with a calm or aggressive demeanor. The choice you make is very important. If you confront him in front of others, he may do/say something that’s irrational; he doesn’t want to be embarrassed. If you believe confronting him in front of others is your best course of action, leave him with a way to save face. Some bullies love to ‘get even’ by doing things behind your back and you don’t want to be looking over your shoulder.

If you fight back against the bully do so with a force that he’ll perceive as being significantly greater than his power. A bully wants to pick on easy targets. Don’t make yourself easy.

What are the characteristics of a bully? They are of someone that wants to be respected, liked, and recognized. To deal with him either feed or starve the beast. The way you initially engage him will determine the interaction that occurs past that point. Thus, at the first sign of bullying, confront the aggressor. Doing so will put him on guard to the fact that he’s not going to have an easy time in his attempts to bully you… and everything will be right with the world.

Remember, you’re always negotiating.

Web site design has gone through many evolutions with techniques coming and going. Most of this evolution has revolved around page layout and site navigation, today a modern site does indeed present a clear and easy experience for the visitor. However one area that seems to have been neglected is the display of numerical information. Perhaps this is due, in part, to that fact that not every site has numerical data to display or perhaps web designers are so focused on ‘look and feel’ that they neglect the clarity of information.

Getting visitors to a site is quite a task as we all know. So when we get them there we want them stay and understand the content. If that content involves numerical data then isn’t it worth making a little extra effort to present that data in a format that is both pleasing to the eye and enticing. So how do we do that? Well when you start to think about it, it really isn’t any different to the way we approach general site design. Today we wouldn’t dream of just chucking all the content at random on a page and expecting the visitor to make sense of it. So rather than just take the raw numbers and throw them into a table let’s give it a little thought. Think about what the data could be saying to user and then start to break it down into headline numbers and paragraphs as you would do with text information.

Numerical data can usually be quite easily segmented and totaled. Summing sections of data provide headline attention grabbing numbers, whilst segmenting provides the opportunity to paragraph the data making far more information easily accessible and far more interesting for the viewer. For example, let’s suppose we have a whole series of sales data and let’s imagine our organisation sells four products. Our raw data is a set of individual sales numbers. Simply placing this data in one big table, although displaying all the data, does not really provide very much information. For instance a normal user would have no idea which product is most popular or whether there are any trends or seasonal variations. With a little thought and effort we can do much better, let’s start by segmenting our sales figures by month and then within each month segment further by product. For each product / month cell we have two numbers, the total value of sales and the number of sales. Providing this in just a simple table will be far more meaningful than our original raw data set. The user can now begin to see which product is performing well and also whether any particular time of year is good or bad. However we can still do much better.

Even at this level of segmentation we are still making the viewer work to see the story contained within the data. Now that we have the data sensibly segmented it becomes a fairly easy task to display in graphical format. Done well graphs are extremely powerful because they both present information in a visual format and add dimension to the data. Relationships between adjacent data and trends across the range are made crystal clear. Choosing the correct chart style is key for making this work really well. Should we use pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs and something more exotic. In our sales data example remember we are looking to provide some attention grabbing headline followed by a paragraph of interesting detail. A viewer of our information may first be most interested in which of our products is the best performing. Although a bar graph of total sales for each product would provide this information, a pie chart representing the product totals would be more attention grabbing. So for our headline let’s provide the user with a pie chart of total sales. Now all we need to do is provide the paragraph, well the choice with our example data is a multi-series vertical bar chart. We have a series of data for each product segmented by month. Along the x-axis we will plot month and the y-axis will represent value of sales. Each month on the graph will contain 3 bars, one for each product. This simple approach provides the viewer with a great deal of information in one pleasing view. The bar chart tells the complete sales story for each of our products showing both trends and easy visual comparisons.

That’s all well and good, I hear you say, but web pages don’t lend themselves to easily generating graphical display. Well that’s true but there are today a wide variety of software packages that have specifically been designed to plugin to web sites and make the task of turning the numbers into eye catching, story telling graphs easy for the web designer. Generally you set a few options, like colours and then simply provide the segmented data to the software. At page view time your visitor is presented with the graph image.

In summary then, with a little thought and a small amount of effort the numbers can really be brought alive and provide a compelling story for visitors.